Posts tagged with 'copenhagen'
Weekly Mulch: BP Oil Spill Stalls Climate Bill
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By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
“There’s a dead dolphin on this beach,” Mother Jones‘ Mac McClelland, wrote yesterday in Louisiana. It’s one snapshot of the harm visited on the Gulf Coast by the BP oil spill. Back in Washington, the Senate climate bill, which would put the country on a path to cleaner energy consumption, is on its last legs.
You’d think that after a seemingly unstoppable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (official estimates are up to 50,000 barrels a day, as of yesterday) and the hottest spring on record (hello, climate change!), U.S. citizens and elected representatives would recognize that our country’s thirst for resources has consequences.
It’s not just that oil is spilling into the Gulf, even after BP hit on a fix. Besides the blow-out that has dominated headlines, another, more routine spill showed up near the Louisiana coast. The Deepwater Horizon spill is now the larger of two spills in the Gulf Coast, according to Care2. A week ago in Pennsylvania, a natural gas well owned by EOG Resources (formerly Enron) shot a geyser of chemical-laced water 75 feet into the air; and on Monday, in West Virginia, another natural gas well, this one owned by Chief Oil and Natural Gas, also exploded, as AlterNet reports.
Yet BP is still supplying the Pentagon with oil and gas, as Jeremy Scahill writes at The Nation. Senators are still supporting natural gas exploration and off-shore oil drilling. The White House has also abandoned any intention of pushing for strong legislation that would push for better, cleaner energy. (more…)
Weekly Mulch: Citizens Lead Cochabamba Climate Negotiations
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Environmental advocates from around the world gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, this week and resolved that, a year from now, they would hold a world’s people referendum on climate change to marshal support for the rights of the planet.
“Although it is hoped that some states will cooperate, the participation of governments will not be essential to the referendum, as civil society organizations are to plan it according to their own lights and the traditions and customs of each local area,” reports Franz Chavez for Inter Press Service.
The conference’s democratic, citizen-oriented format starkly contrasted with December’s United Nations-led summit in Copenhagen. The conference at Cochabamba emphasized inclusion and a diversity of voices, providing an antidote to processes like the U.N. climate negotiations, where smaller countries were excluded from key discussions. (more…)
Weekly Mulch: Cochabamba Summit Offers New Approach to Combating Climate Change
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
On Monday, climate activists, nonprofit leaders, and governmental officials will gather in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to look for new ideas to address climate change. The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, organized by leading social organizations like 350.0rg, “will advocate the right to “live well,” as opposed to the economic principle of uninterrupted growth,” as Inter Press Service explains. In the absence of real leadership from the world’s governments, the conferees at Cochabamba are looking for solutions “committed to the rights of people and environment.”
The United States certainly isn’t stepping up. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), were supposed to release their climate legislation next week, just in time for Earth Day. But yesterday the word came down that the release was being pushed back by another week, to April 26. (more…)
Weekly Mulch: Politics Confuse Public Perception of Climate Change
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
Americans don’t know what to think about climate change anymore. A few years ago, the public more or less trusted the science that said human activity was raising global temperatures, but now that Congress and the Obama administration have hemmed and hawed about climate issues, we’re not longer so sure.
Forty-eight percent of Americans—more of us than ever before—believe that reports of global warming are “generally exaggerated,” according to a new Gallup poll. Climate science hasn’t changed, so it’s not crazy to look at these numbers and think that conservatives’ incessant critiques of climate change may be working. (more…)
Weekly Mulch: Climate Change On Obama’s Back Burner
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
In his first State of the Union address, President Barack Obama touched on climate issues only briefly. He called on the Senate to pass a climate bill, but did not give Congress a deadline or promise to veto weak legislation. Nor did he mention the Copenhagen climate conference, where international negotiators struggled to produce an agreement on limiting global carbon emissions.
The Obama administration’s attitude towards climate change still represents a remarkable shift from the Bush years, when global warming was treated as little more than a fairy tale. But in the past year, Congressional squabbling has stalled climate legislation, and international negotiators nearly gridlocked in talks over carbon admissions at the multinational Copenhagen conference. Without strong leadership from the president, work to prevent this looming environmental crisis will stall. (more…)
Weekly Mulch: Climate Reform’s Good, Bad, and Ugly
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
The next United Nations climate change conference is almost a year away, and health care is still dominating the legislative agenda in Washington. That means climate reform opponents, from the coal industry to the global warming skeptics, have plenty of time to work, out of the spotlight, to derail progress. Here’s a glimpse of the enemies of reform—and the companies and individuals that are still fighting for change in 2010.
Take the case of Cape Wind, an offshore wind farm planned for Massachusetts’ Nantucket Sound, as an example. The project faced yet another roadblock this week, when the National Park Service said the site could be listed as a historical place, prized by Nantucket’s Native American tribes. But as Kate Sheppard writes in Mother Jones, the park service’s decision counts as a victory for a less sympathetic opponent as well. William Koch is the founder and president of the Oxbow Group, a privately-held group of companies, and he has laid out more than a million dollars to fight Cape Wind. (more…)
Weekly Mulch: Climate Change Bill Stalls in Senate
By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen should have cleared a path for the U.S. Congress move forward again on climate change legislation, but Senate Democrats already are saying the bill might not come in 2010. After fights over the stimulus and health care, legislators are less willing to stomach compromises on climate change. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is looking smarter for having passed the House’s version of the climate change bill when she had the chance.
Brian Beutler reports for TPM that in the Senate, conservative Democrats from coal, oil, and manufacturing states are taking a stand against cap-and-trade provisions, which would limit carbon emissions nationwide. According to Beutler, “It’s likely impossible that [President Barack Obama] and Senate leadership will be able to keep the Democratic party united to stop a filibuster of cap-and-trade legislation, which means Democrats will have to secure the support of a handful of moderate Republicans—nuclear energy enthusiasts, in particular—if they hope to pass a meaningful bill.”
After the House of Representatives passed a climate change bill in July, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) set a September deadline for the six committees with a stake in the legislation to finish their work. Four months later, the Environmental and Public Works committee, the first to tackle the issue, is still debating a version of the bill sponsored by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA).
With slow progress on the Kerry-Boxer bill, more business-friendly options are bubbling up from the Senate. Sen. Kerry has teamed up with Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and with progressives’ most reviled Congressman, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), to craft a bill that Republicans might support. Another effort, led by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), restricts carbon inputs rather than carbon emissions. (Need a refresher on proposed climate solutions? The Nation’s Chris Hayes can help.)
The Cantwell-Collins effort has at least one advantage over the House’s 1,498-page climate change bill, as David Morris reports for AlterNet. It’s only 39 pages—so far. More importantly, Morris writes, this strategy “treats carbon trading as a necessary evil, not the core of an emission reduction strategy, thereby probably earning the senators the eternal hatred of a Wall Street salivating over the potential bonuses another multi-trillion-dollar global securities market would generate.”
Despite these alternatives and resistance from some Democrats to cap-and-trade, Steve Benen notes at the Washington Monthly that the framework that the House passed in July and that provided the starting point for the original Kerry-Boxer proposal does have some positives.
“Proponents note that the policy has some pretty compelling selling points, including the fact that it caps emissions, combats global warming, reduces pollution, helps create new jobs in a burgeoning sector, and lowers the federal budget deficit, all at the same time,” Benen writes. If the Senate leadership gives into pressure from moderate Dems, he continues, the consequences are high.
“This needs to get done, and if the Senate takes a pass on 2010, it’s hard to imagine when the next available opportunity might be. It’s not as if this will get easier after Republicans make likely gains in the midterms,” Benen concludes.
Without a climate change bill in 2010, United States representatives will carry the same handicap—a recalcitrant legislature that could reject a global accord—to the next round of United Nations negotiations. Without legislation to back their proposals, U.S. negotiators lose the power to hold other countries’ accountable to global climate change goals.
Already, the U.N. is planning how to improve the treaty process for next year. As Andy Kroll notes at Mother Jones, “The world has changed considerably—economically, ecologically, socially, etc., etc.—since the existing UN treaty process was set into motion after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit where countries drafted the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty that each subsequent Conference of the Parties, or COP, attempted to build on and improve.”
Splitting the world into industrialized, developed, and developing countries may no longer make sense, writes Kroll. Smaller, less developed nations did their best to alert the conference to their needs, but the final agreement came from larger powers like India and China, developing countries with agendas markedly different than those of nations like Tuvalu. The unenthusiastic reception of that deal highlighted problems with the treaty process as much as disagreements among the participating nations.
“If the recent climate talks illustrated anything, it’s the extent to which the current treaty framework—an unwieldy process in which consensus among the 192 participating countries is near impossible—no longer serves its intended purpose of guiding nations toward meaningful, rigorous emissions reductions,” Kroll writes.
As global leaders try to move forward from Copenhagen, the impact of that breakdown should become clearer, as Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard explains. “Because the document was not adopted unanimously, it has no real legal or formal bearing—it may never play a role in future UN deliberations.” Sheppard writes. “Converting this accord into meaningful action will be torturous. For all the angst the document provoked, it is extremely vague and leaves many key details unresolved.”
For years, the United States would not commit to the climate change goals agreed on through the U.N. treaty process, and now, any progress the Congress does make may come too late.
“Although Obama said on Friday that he and other leaders remain committed to a new, legally binding treaty in the future, there is no road map or timeline in the accord to reach such a goal,” Sheppard explains.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
The Mulch: Frustrated, Obama Calls for Action
By Alison Hamm, Media Consortium Blogger
President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated arrival in Copenhagen today has turned from a hopeful sign of success into a grim reality check. Immediately after arriving this morning, Obama joined an unscheduled meeting with 18 other world leaders before the most high-profile session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop15) began. The deal depends on the United States and China, the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gas emissions to reach an agreement on a course of action. (more…)
The Mulch: Peaceful Protests Turn Violent in Copenhagen
By Alison Hamm, Media Consortium Blogger
The United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop15) turned ugly today when police officers beat back hundreds of demonstrators, including a group of 50 to 100 delegates that were trying to meet with the protesters.
More than 250 people were arrested, including spokespeople for Climate Justice Action (CJA), a global network of NGOs that organized a walkout at the Bella Center today. CJA’s spokesperson Dan Glall told Mantoe Phakathi at Inter Press Service that “as a condition for going back to the negotiations, we demand industrialized nations uphold the Kyoto Protocol, commit adequate funds to adaptation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly.”
OneClimate has video (below) of today’s walkout.
“More than 1,000 people have been arrested, detained and released over the course of the past week,” Jennifer Prediger writes for Grist. “Some were made to sit on freezing sidewalks for six hours in a nasty version of time out. The people who threw rocks and set cars on fire were rightfully detained. But the droves who were dragged in last night for dancing awkwardly in Christiana? Seems like overkill to me.”
The chaos outside reflects the increasing pressure inside the Bella Center, as delegates turn to the United States and China for leadership in the final days of the summit. Together these countries account for 42 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.
In order to finalize a global climate agreement in Copenhagen, both countries need to take a big step forward, as David Doniger and Barbara Finamore report for Grist. For the U.S., this means aid for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people; for China, this means making steady progress to meet the country’s carbon reduction goals.
The U.S. has already committed to pay its share of a $30 billion fund to last through 2012. “But to lead in Copenhagen, the U.S. needs to back even larger investments to meet these core needs for the longer-term—2015 or 2020,” Doniger and Finamore write. “China has the opportunity to enhance its standing as a responsible world leader by building global confidence in the implementation of its carbon reduction goals.”
But as David Corn reports for Mother Jones, China and the U.S. are apparently “stuck in a standoff.” An Obama administration official insisted that it’s not about the money: “‘We have to get the developing nations into an international agreement,’ the official said… Yet China has forcefully resisted the idea of incorporating their self-professed emissions goals (essentially, slowing the growth rate of emissions) into a binding agreement. China has also repeatedly said that it will not submit its performance to official outside vetting.”
Corn writes, “But with 115 heads of states beginning to arrive, the Copenhagen talks have left some fundamental gaps for the last minute. Even if those gaps are bridged, the resulting agreement could fall far short of what experts say is necessary to redress the dire consequences of rising global temperatures. Just ask the scientists roaming the halls.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Copenhagen today in a last minute appearance. Clinton has booked a full day of meetings on Thursday and will join President Barack Obama in negotiations when he arrives Friday. Like Obama’s schedule switch at the conference (he originally planned to be there last week and instead will arrive Friday), Clinton’s arrival could indicate the U.S.’s intention to seal a deal by the end of the week.
For live updates of the negotiations and protests, check out The Uptake’s live video stream from the Bella Center.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
The Mulch: A Global Day of Action
By Alison Hamm, Media Consortium Blogger
UPDATE: Negotiations stalled today in Copenhagen when African nations walked out in protest of perceived attempts by rich nations to kill the Kyoto Protocol, as Talking Points Memo reports. The talks are back in session now. Watch Link TV’s live stream from Copenhagen for more on this story as it develops.
On Saturday, December 12, climate activists rallied to call for a binding climate agreement. Vigils, fasts, and protests were held around the world, and in the largest environmental demonstration in history, 100,000 activists marched in downtown Copenhagen from the Christiansborg Palace to the Bella Center, where the United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop15) is being held. (more…)